Full Title: International Argument Alternation Workshop
Short Title: IAAW

Date: 20-Jul-2025 - 21-Jul-2025
Location: Kobe University, Japan
Contact Person: Kiyoko Toratani
Meeting Email: [email protected]
Web Site: https://sites.google.com/view/iaaw2025

Linguistic Field(s): Cognitive Science; General Linguistics; Semantics; Syntax; Typology

Call Deadline: 31-Dec-2024

Meeting Description:

The International Argument Alternation Workshop (IAAW) will be held in person at Kobe University in Kobe City, Hyogo Prefecture, Japan, on July 20 and July 21, 2025.

“Argument alternations” are phenomena in which a set of (or one of the) arguments of the verb have alternative realizations (in terms of grammatical relations, case marking, etc.) (e.g., Dowty 2000; Levin and Rappaport Hovav 2005). English has a wide range of argument alternations. Some representative ones include causative/inchoative alternation (e.g., The boy broke the dish/The dish broke), locative alternation (e.g., John loaded hay onto the truck/John loaded the truck with hay), and dative alternation (e.g., Chris gave Kim a book/Chris gave a book to Kim), among many others (Levin 1993).

Argument alternations have been studied by applying a diverse range of theories, methods, and approaches: cognitive linguistics (e.g., Law 2022), corpus linguistics (e.g., Gries and Stefanowitsch 2004), Construction Grammar (e.g., Goldberg 1995), Head-Driven Phrase Structure Grammar (e.g., Davis, Koenig and Wechsler 2021), Generative Grammar (e.g., Baker 1988), Lexical-Functional Grammar (e.g., Bresnan and Kanerva 1989), Role and Reference Grammar (e.g., Van Valin 2007), and typology (e.g., Malchukov 2015), to name a few.

The workshop aims to serve as a platform encouraging cross-theoretical discussions on argument alternations, bringing together researchers with different backgrounds. We invite papers that discuss new data or new generalizations of argument alternations—they can be argument alternation patterns from understudied languages or microvariations of already well-studied alternations (verb A alternates but verb B does not, yet both verbs belong to the same category), or papers that highlight some fresh data on well- or less-known argument alternations and discuss them in light of a newly developed component of the theory or under a new perspective.

We welcome papers dealing with any types/aspects of argument alternations (e.g., swarm alternation, passive, possessor raising, noun incorporation, differential subject/object marking). We are particularly interested in research on less-known types (e.g., Kishimoto 2024).

Possible research questions include (but are not limited to):

1. Are there any differences in the encoded lexical meanings between the alternants?
2. How are the morphological codings motivated in argument alternations? Are they unique to the alternations or found elsewhere?
3. Are alternations driven syntactically or semantically? What is the evidence for the division?
4. Are there microvariations or speaker variations in alternation patterns? How are they motivated?
5. What do diachronic data tell us about the changes involved in argument alternations?
6. Can a metaphor improve the acceptability of an alternating pattern (cf. Salkoff 1983)? If so, why?
7. Are multiple argument alternations possible with a single verb? What factors trigger them?
8. What is the possible range of the (micro-)variations in argument alternations? What is their motivation?
9. Are there any grammatical contexts in which one alternant is possible, while the other is not? Why?
10. What semantic classes of predicates show the same alternation patterns?
11. Are there any grammatical operations that make argument alternations possible?

Note: Kobe University will consecutively host two independent international meetings. IAAW (July 20-21, 2025) will take place immediately after The 18th International Conference on Role and Reference Grammar (RRG2025) (July 18-19, 2025).

Call for Papers:

Submissions are invited for 20-minute oral presentations (+10 min. Q&A.).
Please submit an anonymous one-page abstract, not exceeding 500 words, including examples (references and tables/figures may be on the second page), by December 31, 2024, in PDF format, via EasyAbs system on the Linguist List, whose URL will become available in November 2024.

Please use a few representative words from the title as the filename (e.g., locative_clear_verbs_korean.pdf) to maintain the file’s anonymity.
Authors may submit one individual and/or one co-authored abstract.

Important dates:
• Abstract submission: November 1 - December 31, 2024
• Notification of acceptance: January 31, 2025
• Workshop dates: July 20 and 21, 2025

Scientific committee:

John Beavers (The University of Texas, Austin)
Hideki Kishimoto (Kobe University)
Jean-Pierre Koenig (University at Buffalo)
Andrej Malchukov (University of Mainz)
Gillian Ramchand (UiT The Arctic University of Norway)
Robert Van Valin, Jr. (University at Buffalo/ Heinrich Heine University Düsseldorf)
Stephen Wechsler (The University of Texas, Austin)
Michael Wilson (University of Delaware)

Workshop organizers:

Hideki Kishimoto (Kobe University)
Kiyoko Toratani (York University)

For the full call for papers, visit the website: https://sites.google.com/view/iaaw2025